Kevin Augustine is one of my favorite performers in the current puppet scene. He brings to his work a sincerity and authenticity that is rare in our field. His powerful stage presence as an actor is an equal match for his totally moving and engaging puppet creations, and so he is one of the few puppeteers I know of who successfully performs as an actor among puppets he is also manipulating. His work has been proof and inspiration to me of the value of nuance and investment in character in a field often drowning in technical concerns and gadgetry. He is truly a man of the theatre, and in his hands the simplest act of bringing life to the inanimate becomes a hugely theatrical event...mysterious and frightening, full of emotion, tension, and magic that is satisfyingly total because it all springs forth form the mind and soul of one very talented man. -Basil Twist "When Eileen Blumenthanl spoke about American puppetry at the UNIMA festival in Perth she had just seen Kevin Augustine's BRIDE and she described it as having some of the darkest, most frightening images that she had seen in the realm of puppet theatre. ...BRIDE is a work of great intensity and towering ambition...the subject is epic; the style poetic, the imagery is nightmarish. The script comes from religious and philosophical sources. Although the subjects are deep and complex, the source material remains in the background and the actual text uses words with great economy and touches of sly, subtle wit. ...As an on-stage performer, Kevin Augustine is an actor who mesmerizes the audience with rich, powerful, nuanced portrayals. His puppet characterizations are equally strong, and there is complete separation and definition between Kevin, visible as a human character, and the puppet character his is manipulating.
"Brilliant puppeteer Kevin Augustine has a God complex." 4 stars
In this brilliant and disturbing creation myth from Brooklyn-based puppet theatre Lone Wolf Tribe, God may not be dead, but he isn't feeling particularly well. Although Lone Wolf Tribe is a tight and unified ensemble, Bride is primarily the vision of Kevin Augustine, who wrote, directed (with Ken Berman), designed the puppets, and portrays the senile, sock-gartered deity. He's playing with some potentially cringe-inducing subjects here -- the mother goddess, reconciling the male and female cosmic principles, etc. -- but stages them with such imagination and dry wit that the material bypasses New Age corn and penetrates straight to the viewer's subconscious. Visually, Bride occupies a dark alternative universe that suggests a kinship with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet (The City of Lost Children) and surrealist animators the Brothers Quay.
He's not shy, folks: Actor/writer/director/puppeteer Kevin Augustine takes on the role of God himself in "Bride," a supremely creepy fantasia that reimagines a patriarchal deity as a jaundiced, decrepit Gepetto figure, constantly overwhelmed by the trouble in the world. The story scans like a master's thesis from the Marvel Comics School of Questionable Cosmology, but the play's endlessly imaginative, junk-strewn production design makes the world of "Bride" worth visiting -- though you probably wouldn't want to go there when you die.
"Kevin Augustine showcases his incredibly detailed puppets, all of them with the darkly sensuous touch of the artist, in a psychological mind f**k that will have you rethinking all you thought you knew about puppetry."
Lone Wolf Tribe's Bride is that weird sort of wonderful that brings butterflies to the stomach and flashes of color to the eyes. Inventive, unique, and a superlative work of theater, Kevin Augustine's hybrid puppet/human epic is an intensely fascinating show. ...Bride is a macabre dance that fuses puppets (Augustine) right out of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas with a large set (Tom Lee) pockmarked with anachronistic terminals and gramophones straight from Terry Gilliam's brain. ...A twisted, clever work of theater, for all this darkness, Bride remains a stark and beautiful work of art. What's most astonishing is that, despite using puppets, there is nothing small about this show. (Hell, there's even a fully discordant band, led by Andrea La Rose and featuring soprano Rachel Carter White.) From the epic plot to the full use of P122's wide upstairs space, Bride features a larger-than-life atmosphere that is filled with beauty, surprise, and heart-thudding creativity. So yes, I do; I wouldn't have my plays any other way.NEW THEATRE CORP Bride, the new theatre piece by Kevin Augustine and Lone Wolf Tribe, is monumental, epic, and audacious. ...it takes its audience to a world of singular vision and grotesque beauty—a place surely none of us has ever been before. ...Augustine’s performance is extraordinary. ...Each of the movements in Bride represents a remarkable feat of imagination, and the realization of them is astonishing and artful.
"An eerie creation myth that conjures an otherworldly dystopia" "Augustine's puppetry is often compelling, especially the ragged, prune-faced child whose trials at the hands of its peculiar dad evoke a strong sympathy. Watching the tyke descend a staircase made of skeletons to a rat-filled basement, its fear is palpable-quite an achievement."
Mr. Augustine plays God impressively
The prop list for Culturemart 2007 is a daunting thing to imagine: For example, take former Here resident artist Kevin Augustine’s “Bride.” The stage is set with a fascinating abundance of props: lamps, manhole covers, wires, and switch boxes. In a downstage corner, there is an impressive pile of leg bones, mannequin heads, and prosthetic limbs partially concealed in plastic. Augustine himself sits on a carved wooden throne, half naked, painted white, wearing sunglasses, and listening to sounds emanating from the large golden horn of a phonograph. An ape-masked performer (Catherine Wronowski) drags herself across the stage while fussing over the many props until Augustine rises and moves to the wings, to be hooked to wires and lifted into the air with a macabre foam puppet (also wonderfully detailed) attached to his front. The dexterity with which simple movements are painstakingly conducted is brilliant. Who cares what the piece is about?
Bride is a theatre work in-progress. Kevin Augustine took the bold step of presenting scenes or sketches of a longer, still to-be-invented theatre work to audiences at the Fringe Festival. The on-stage Kevin is an actor of appealing intensity. He weaves a spell that carries the audience through moments of high energy creativity including times of clearly focused inspiration, fumbling self doubt, cosmic connectedness, trivial distractions, and playful improvisations. An artist is at work here. The puppet characters in Bride are grotesque and innocent. Kevin’s on stage interaction with these vulnerable creatures of his own imagination shows a concern, and a tender respect. The interaction feels genuine, even soulful.
“What part of ourselves must we brutalize to reach happiness? On an $84 vision quest, Jeff wades through his subconscious with Eugene—his wraithlike spirit guide--gradually forcing his own feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred onto the little creature. Kevin Augustine's masterful puppetry and pulsating stage presence expose the under-belly of the mental health community, where institutions ask us to surrender anything feral, delicate, and alive to “the system.””
“The genius of this extraordinary artist is to endow his amazing creations with something very near the stuff of humanity in a way that's eerily almost-miraculous.“It's a disturbing, unsettling, and sad journey that Augustine takes us on: his preoccupations—macabre, surreal—jolt us and tug at our emotions. Yet the very definition of life, and what makes it worth living, is at the core of Animal. The images that Augustine creates will haunt you for days. I don't know anybody who is doing theatre quite like this. This is indisputably a work of theatre that demands to be experienced.” (excerpted) “They may be puppets, but do not confuse these cloth creations with Kermit, Big Bird or Snuffy. While Muppets struggle with the alphabet, Animal addresses the media’s effect on the human soul and the true meaning of happiness. Creator Kevin Augustine successfully designs a surreal netherworld with macabre puppets that become more human than their puppeteers and have the power to evoke authentic empathy from the audience.”
“Augustine's artistry as actor/puppet handler never fails to astonish me; he's also a fine playwright, and he's done a masterful job excerpting this story of a shaman-in-training for whom a genetically altered "assistant" is being created in a brutal, futuristic cloning lab. Augustine's subject is almost always the terrifying edges of existence and creation, and in Animal he hypothesizes a couple of different kinds of hell from which his characters seem destined never to be quite able to escape. What's on view here is 25 minutes of utter genius—gorgeous and scary and heartbreaking. It will almost certainly whet your appetite for the entire show, which returns to HERE briefly in October. Meanwhile, it makes for a stunning conclusion to a very successful and exciting evening at New York's newest theatre festival.”
A must see tour-de-force. -This Month on Stage Augustine is one of the greatest puppet artisans working today. He and his company have proved themselves capable of creating brilliant works of art. Their ability to inject the puppets' reality into our own is uncanny. Kevin Augustine's puppets are incredible creatures. Their intricacies are many, with fine facial features and clever physical manipulations that lend them a super-reality. Their carefully chiseled, slightly askew contours make them simultaneously disturbing and melancholic. And with the fine-tuned coordination of Augustine and his fellow puppeteers, the characters come to life in an astounding manner. Add to the list of characters a luminescent butterfly and a book that attempts to fly from its reader's hand, and Augustine has created a magical world in which anything goes, a world particular to puppetry and to Augustine's work in particular.
Spectators find Big Top Machine enlightening, thanks to Augustine's ability to conjure a Peter Pan-like tale about a young man who joins a circus in search of heroes and modern-day magic in cynical times. Slipping in and out of a variety of amusing carny characters, Augustine portrays Stan, the naive caped hero of the play, while also skillfully animating his eerily visceral puppets, which include a seedy ringmaster and a skeptical young boy who lead Stan to believe that circus heroes and enchantment are nothing more than Barnum shams.
This show has the potential to make us wish for an innocence we have lost forever.
I gasped with delight along with the audience as each new wonder was revealed, and I was moved to tears by the story’s conclusion. In short, I had the kind of theatre experience one always hopes for, but only rarely enjoys. This show is absolutely not to be missed.
Big Top Machine, a sly and sometimes heartbreaking celebration of wonder, is also an inquisition into our collective loss of capacity for same; it is, furthermore (and perhaps above all else) a showcase for the remarkable and very particular talents of Kevin Augustine, an actor, playwright, and puppeteer whose work has amassed a small cult following and whose most recent play, Animal, has just been published by NYTE. .... don't miss it. ...And in a tour de force at the very beginning of Big Top Machine, he more or less turns himself into a puppet, with his black-shrouded assistants decking him out in various accessories (tie, hat, scarf, etc.) as he re-creates Ramsey's audition for the circus, playing all the parts with rapid-fire precision and perfect, hilarious timing. ...The show's piece de resistance/climax is a jolting, thrilling deconstruction of Augustine's puppetry art. Watch this remarkable performer argue with himself—Frank the puppet versus Ramsey the hero: the actor debunks the artistry as just so much smoke and mirrors, and illusion and magic collide with reality and self-deception.
Kevin Augustine's "10" was generating significant buzz and turned out to be the most exciting of the shows I saw; "10" is an hour of psychologically eerie puppetry and monologue with an edgily sweet twist. Written and staged by Augustine, who also designed the puppets - compelling, life-size foam-rubber figures with the craggy features of crude stone carvings, has two adept puppeteers bring the creations to life with a sorrowful gentleness in unsettling contrast to his tense, febrile John Malkovich-like energy. Working barefoot (his feet manipulate the puppets as well) he creates a compelling drama as moving as it is creepy. Roll a show like "10" and you've come up a winner.
Kevin Augustine's stunning, mysterious play has the strange beauty of a David Lynch movie and its own skewed, desperate vision. Augustine wrote, directed, built the puppets, and performs this enigmatic version of the Frankenstein story, assisted onstage by two gifted puppeteers, Jane Catherine Shaw and Carol Binion. Andrew (Augustine) awaits his fiancée on his wedding day; she fails to appear. Andy subsumes his pain in a plan to create a man who can dance to Tchaikovsky. He enters a strange contest for "Creators," others who are attempting the same thing as him, some who've achieved acclaim for their results and who arouse his envy. Andy's creature, the puppet Daniel, begins to take form -- his haggard, misshapen face, his scarred, patchwork body -- but his legs cause Daniel too much pain to dance as his progenitor has planned, and Andy despairs. As he lies on the floor in pain, certain he's failed, Daniel begins to dance, and the moment is overwhelming. 10 is a great and terrible fable about art and love.
Every piece, with the exception of one, fell short of Puppet Parlor standards. Only Kevin Augustine's work-in-progress, "Ten," measured up. Augustine was one of the featured performers in last year's Fringe Festival where his "Big Top Machine" showed off his considerable acting and puppeteering talents. "Ten" featured Augustine, looking a lot like John Malkovich, being interrogated by invisible authorities.
"Augustine's concise writing and energetic performance was truly powerful."
In a masterful display of creative control, Augustine becomes the entire cast - five life-size puppets and three flesh-and-blood characters - of the two-act play he wrote and directed. Grotesque and disturbingly real, Augustine's foam rubber puppets transcend the innocent bounds of 'family entertainment' with an eerie, breathtaking profundity.
This ain't no stinkin' Sesame Street. Augustine is a fearless, accomplished performer, and his manipulation of his unnerving foam creations gives them seemingly autonomous life. They argue, they drink, they even vomit, and when he and an 8-foot tall puppet struggle with a knife, its anybody's guess who will win. Once Vaudeville is splendidly theatrical.
It should be noted that Augustine doesn’t even attempt to emulate the look-I’m-not-moving-my-lips shtick of the traditional ventriloquist. When (the puppets) talk, the actor’s lips move freely, but he invests them with such presence that you don’t notice. Your attention is focused on the dummy, not the person manipulating it, and that, it would seem, is the essence of ventriloquism.”
Kevin Augustine and his Lone Wolf Tribe sent a Thursday audience the comic curveball of HIFA 2004 with his piece “Once Vaudeville.” Dry, dark and at times bizarre, the play was a technical and dramatic masterpiece, as Kevin took us on a trip through the “Matty (Matthew!) And Jimmy Show”, and all the shadows contained therein. The line between reality and performance was blurred immediately as Mathew Jr., son of a legendary puppeteer, welcomed patrons to his show. Following in his father’s footsteps Matthew has employed the help of a retired puppet, Jimmy, to once more regain the love and attention of his craft’s heyday. Nervous and somewhat lacking in talent, the young puppeteer has chosen the wrong assistant as Jimmy is senile, stubborn and missing his right arm. The show is a disaster. Matthew Jr. is weak, the jokes old fashioned and Jimmy refused to cooperate, berating the young man at every opportunity, pushing him closer and closer to a very obvious edge. A confused audience is not assisted by yet another reality question, as Jimmy at times becomes Mathew’s father, calling for “the nurse” and Matthew brings him back by calling him “Pop”. The result of the puppet’s abuse is a minor breakdown, the puppet abandoned and Matthew stripping down, revealing his deep insecurities. The play is about wrong choices and fear. Mathew’s father hid from the world through humor and jokes, never allowing anyone, especially his son, close. His only friend was Jimmy and the puppet remained as Matthew Jr’s only tangible link with the father he never knew and was never loved by. In the end the puppeteer died in a hospital, incontinent and with only his son as comfort, a son he believed to be Jimmy. He chose the fleeting over the immortal and entertainment over love. Matthew Jr. meanwhile chose to link himself with the reason for his misery. He chose a constant reminder of loss and rejection in a sad attempt to get closer to a man he never knew. Tipped by Manuel Bagorro to be the “cult show of HIFA 2004” Once Vaudeville is theatre as one can hardly imagine it- deep, black and heroically sad.
"Kevin Augustine takes incredible chances on stage where he bears his heart mind and soul with ferocious intensity. He is one of the most compelling and charismatic actors working in Philadelphia today....his manipulation of {his puppets} is so suburb, these inanimate objects come to seem tangibly human."
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